The Messenger of the Covenant

Scripture: Malachi 1–2 (with Romans 9:13 and Matthew 19:4–6)

Before this session, read Malachi 1–2: the LORD’s opening declaration, I have shown love to you, and the people’s cynical How have you shown love to us?; the rebuke of the priests who offer blind and lame and sick animals on the LORD’s altar and treat His table as if it were of no importance; the promise that His name will be great among the nations, from the east to the west; the corruption of the covenant with Levi by priests who were meant to be the messengers of the LORD who rules over all; and the LORD’s anger at the profaning of the covenant of marriage. Keep your Bible open, and ask: what does it mean that the last age of the Old Testament was an age of weariness and cynicism? And how does the LORD answer a tired and contemptuous people?

For the lips of a priest should preserve knowledge of sacred things, and people should seek instruction from him because he is the messenger of the LORD who rules over all.
(Malachi 2:7)

The Last Voice

With Malachi we come to the end. He is the last of the prophets, the final voice of the Old Testament, speaking perhaps a hundred years after Haggai and Zechariah had stirred the people to rebuild the temple. The fire of the return had long since burned down to embers. The temple stood, the sacrifices were offered, the forms of religion ground on, but the heart had gone out of it. Malachi addresses a community that is not in open rebellion, not bowing to Baal in the high places, but something subtler and, in its way, sadder: a people grown weary, cynical, and bored with God. They keep up the motions of worship while despising it in their hearts; they question whether God loves them, whether His worship is worth the trouble, whether He even sees the difference between good and evil. It is the spiritual condition of a late and comfortable age, and so it speaks with peculiar force to our own.

It is worth pausing to feel where we are standing. Malachi is the last prophet God would send for four hundred years. After him the voice of prophecy falls silent; no canonical word would be added until a man in camel’s hair stood by the Jordan and cried that the kingdom of heaven was at hand. Four centuries of silence stretch between the last verse of Malachi and the first chapter of Matthew, four centuries in which the people of God waited, often without knowing what they waited for, while empires rose and fell over their heads. And so this little book sits at a seam in the whole story, the place where the Old Testament hands the reader over to a long, dark waiting before the dawn. That the last word before the silence is a word to a tired, cynical, half-hearted people is itself a kind of mercy; God did not fall silent in wrath, but left His people a promise to hold in the dark: the promise of a Messenger, and a Sun about to rise.

Malachi’s name means my messenger, and his book has a distinctive shape: it is a series of disputes. Again and again the LORD lays a charge against His people, and instead of repenting they answer back with a cynical question: how? How have you shown love to us? How have we made light of your name? How have we wearied him? It is the voice of a heart that has grown too jaded to feel either the love of God or its own sin; it meets every word of God with a shrug and a quibble. The whole book is the LORD’s patient, searching answer to that shrug, and it ends, as we shall see in the next session, not with a final rebuke but with a promise: that He would send His Messenger, and after him the great Day, and the rising of a healing Sun. But first He must get behind the shrug, and He begins where He always begins, with His love.

I Have Shown Love to You

“I have shown love to you,” says the LORD, but you say, “How have you shown love to us?” (1:2). The Hebrew is as plain as it can be: I have loved you. Before a single rebuke, before any charge is laid, the LORD opens His last book to His people with a declaration of love. This is the order of grace, and we have seen it all through the Twelve: the gospel comes first. Whatever Malachi must go on to say about blemished offerings and broken covenants, it is all said by a God who has first said, I have shown love to you. But the people are too far gone in their cynicism even to feel it. How have you shown love to us? they answer. Where is the evidence? What have You ever done for us? It is the question of a heart so dulled by familiarity and disappointment that the very love surrounding it has become invisible.

There is a sober warning in this for any long-settled believer or long-established church. The danger Malachi names is not the dramatic apostasy of a people running after idols; it is the quiet erosion of a faith grown too familiar to feel. Love that is always present can come to be taken for granted, then resented, and at last doubted altogether; the very mercies that surround us daily become invisible precisely because they never stop. The Israelite who could not see that God had loved him was a man standing in a rebuilt city, in a standing temple, under daily provision, asking what have You ever done for me? It is the spiritual blindness of the comfortable, and it is a more common ruin than open rebellion. The cure is not to manufacture feelings but to look again, honestly, at the evidence of grace, and Malachi will force the people to look, beginning with the oldest evidence of all: that God set His love on them when there was nothing to commend them, and has never taken it back.

And the LORD answers the cynical question with the deepest of all answers: His free, distinguishing, unearned love. “Esau was Jacob’s brother,” the LORD explains, “yet I chose Jacob and rejected Esau” (1:2–3). The proof of His love is His choice. Esau and Jacob were brothers, twins, with no difference between them to commend the one over the other; indeed Jacob was the grasper, the deceiver, no better a man than his brother. And the LORD set His love on Jacob, freely, for no merit in Jacob at all. The Hebrew says literally I loved Jacob, and Esau I hated, and that is the language Paul takes up, word for word, when he wants to show that salvation rests on God’s free mercy and not on human deserving: Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated (Romans 9:13), spoken, he reminds us, even before they were born or had done anything good or bad (Romans 9:11). We must hear it rightly, and the NET’s chose … rejected helps us to. The hatred of Esau is the language of covenant choosing, the setting of love upon the one and not upon the other, and the point is not that God delighted to damn Esau, but that His love for Jacob was sheer gift, resting on nothing in Jacob. That is the answer to how have you shown love to us? His love is proved precisely in that it is undeserved; it is grace, and grace is grace only because it is free. If you ask what God ever saw in you to love, the answer is the same as with Jacob: nothing in you, and everything in Himself. He loved you because He loved you. That is the bedrock under the whole book, and under the whole gospel.

We should be careful and clear about what this teaches and what it does not. It teaches that the salvation of God’s people rests wholly on His free and gracious choice, not on anything in them; this is the comfort of election, that our standing with God hangs on His unchanging mercy and not on our changeable selves. But it does not teach that God, in the same breath, decrees the damnation of the lost with the same will by which He saves His own. The Scriptures will not let us make the two halves match; they say plainly that God wants all people to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4), that He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked (Ezekiel 33:11), that those who perish do so by their own fault and unbelief, not because a loveless decree shut them out. The mystery is real, and we do not resolve it; we hold both truths where the Word holds them. Salvation is all of grace, so that the saved may boast only in the Lord; and damnation is all of justice, so that the lost may blame only themselves. What Malachi presses on us here is the first of these: that if you are loved, it is because God freely chose to love you, and for no other reason under heaven.

Improper Sacrifices on My Altar

Having declared His love, the LORD turns to the priests, and the charge is that they despise Him in the very act of worship. A son naturally honors his father and a slave respects his master. If I am your father, where is my honor? If I am your master, where is my respect? (1:6). And the dishonor is concrete: For when you offer blind animals as a sacrifice, is that not wrong? And when you offer the lame and sick, is that not wrong as well? (1:8). The law required offerings without blemish, the best of the flock; the priests were palming off on God the culls, the sick, the dying, the beasts they could not sell or use. They gave God their leftovers and their seconds, and called it worship.

There is an old and telling contrast to set beside this. When King David was offered a threshing floor and oxen for sacrifice as a gift, he refused to take them for nothing, saying he would not offer to the LORD his God sacrifices that cost him nothing. He understood what the priests of Malachi’s day had forgotten: that worship which costs us nothing is worth about that much. The blemished animal was the cheap animal, the one the worshiper would lose nothing by giving up; and a religion of cheap animals is a religion that has quietly decided God is not worth any real sacrifice. The question searches past our ceremonies to our hearts. It is possible to attend faithfully and give nothing, to sing the hymns and withhold the heart, to offer God the hours we had no other use for and the money we would not miss. God sees what it costs us, and what it costs us is the truest measure of what we think He is worth. He does not need our gifts; but He will not be honored by the ones that cost us nothing.

The LORD presses the insult with a homely, devastating challenge: Indeed, try offering them to your governor! Will he be pleased with you or show you favor? (1:8). Try giving the Persian governor a lame, half-dead animal as your tribute, and see how that goes. You would not dream of insulting an earthly official so, yet you hand it to the Maker of heaven and earth and think nothing of it. And then a word that ought to make every careless worshiper tremble: I wish that one of you would close the temple doors, so that you no longer would light useless fires on my altar. I am not pleased with you … and I will no longer accept an offering from you (1:10). God says He would rather the temple doors were bolted shut and the fires left cold than receive such contemptuous worship. He does not want our leftovers. The searching question for us is plain: do we give God the best of our time, our strength, our love, our substance? Or do we hand Him the tired ends of the day, the scraps of attention left over when everything else has been served, and call it devotion? The God who gave His only Son does not deserve our leftovers, and will not be honored by them.

A Pure Offering among the Nations

And then, set against the contemptible worship of the priests, comes one of the most surprising verses in the book: a sudden, sweeping vision of pure worship rising to God from the whole world. For from the east to the west my name will be great among the nations. Incense and pure offerings will be offered in my name everywhere, for my name will be great among the nations (1:11). The Hebrew says literally from the rising of the sun to its setting. While the priests of Israel despise His name at the one altar in Jerusalem, the LORD declares that His name will be great among the nations: from sunrise to sunset, in every place, a pure offering rising to Him from the Gentiles. It is the Gentile ingathering once more, the hope that has gathered through the whole of the Twelve, and here it stands in pointed contrast to the failure of Israel’s own priesthood: the very nations the priests despised would honor the name the priests profaned.

This vision of worship rising from every place is one of the great threads we have followed through the whole of the Twelve, and here it shines with a particular irony. The men whose whole calling was to guard and honor the name of God at the one appointed altar were profaning it; and meanwhile the LORD declares that the very nations outside the covenant, the Gentiles who had never stood at that altar, would come to make His name great from one end of the earth to the other. It is the same reversal we heard in Jonah and Zephaniah and Zechariah: the LORD will not be left without worshipers, and if His own people grow contemptuous, He will gather a people from the ends of the earth who will honor what His own despised. The promise looks past the failure of one priesthood in one city to the day when the worship of God would burst its old boundaries and rise from every place under heaven, a hope that must have sounded almost unthinkable to a small, struggling community huddled around a single temple.

We have watched this promise come true. The day came when worship was no longer bound to one altar in one city, but, as the Lord Jesus told the woman at the well, the true worshipers would worship the Father in spirit and truth, in every place, from the rising of the sun to its setting. Read in the light of the New Testament, the pure offering rising from every place is fittingly heard as the worship of the Church among all the nations: the prayers and praises of the redeemed, the sacrifice of thanksgiving, offered everywhere on earth to the name that is now great among the nations. (The Apology of the Augsburg Confession reads Malachi 1:11 in just this way, as the preaching of the gospel and the faith, prayer, and thanksgiving it creates, not as a sacrifice that earns anything from God; Ap XXIV.) But there is a deeper note here too. Malachi’s whole complaint is that every offering Israel brought was blemished; and the truth is that every offering we bring is blemished still, for there is no pure thing in our hands to give. The only truly pure offering ever made was the offering of the Lamb without defect or blemish, the Lord Jesus, who offered Himself once for all; and our worship is a pure offering only because it rises to God in Him, our blemished gifts made acceptable by the spotless Sacrifice through whom we bring them.

This is a liberating truth for every worshiper who has ever looked honestly at his own worship and despaired of it. If God will accept only a pure offering, and if every offering in our hands is blemished (our prayers distracted, our praises half-hearted, our very repentance shot through with self), then we are shut up to one hope: that there is a pure offering not our own, in which ours may be carried up and accepted. And there is. The apostle tells us that we are built up as a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices that are acceptable to God through Jesus Christ: not acceptable in themselves, but acceptable through Him. Our worship is like a child’s clumsy gift, made precious not by its own worth but by the hand that presents it. The Lord Jesus takes our blemished offerings, cleanses them in His own blood, and presents them to the Father perfumed with the merit of His own spotless sacrifice. So we may worship boldly, not because our offering is pure, but because His is, and ours rises to God in Him.

The Messenger of the Covenant

The LORD turns next to what the priesthood was meant to be, and the picture He draws is beautiful, and a rebuke precisely because it is so far from what they had become. My covenant with him was designed to bring life and peace … He taught what was true; sinful words were not found on his lips. He walked with me in peace and integrity, and he turned many people away from sin (2:5–6). This is the ideal of the covenant with Levi, the priest as he was meant to be: a man who feared God, who taught what was true, who walked with God, and who turned many from their sins. And then the verse that gives this session its name: For the lips of a priest should preserve knowledge of sacred things, and people should seek instruction from him because he is the messenger of the LORD who rules over all (2:7). The priest was to be a messenger, a man who carried God’s truth to the people, the messenger of the covenant.

The covenant with Levi the LORD speaks of reaches back to a moment of zeal in the wilderness, when Phinehas the priest stood against the sin of the people and the LORD granted him a covenant of peace, a perpetual priesthood. The priesthood was a gift and a trust: the priest stood between God and the people, offering their sacrifices and, just as importantly, carrying God’s truth back to them. He was to be a teacher, his lips preserving knowledge, his mouth the place where the people came to seek instruction. A faithful priest turned many from iniquity simply by being what he was: a clear channel of God’s truth into the life of the people. It was a high and beautiful calling, and the tragedy Malachi exposes is how far the priests of his day had fallen from it: the channels were fouled, the teachers had become stumbling blocks, the messengers had garbled the message. The office remained holy; the men in it had betrayed it. And a betrayed office, left long enough, cries out for One who would fill it faithfully at last.

But the priests of Malachi’s day had betrayed the office utterly. You, however, have turned from the way. You have caused many to violate the law; you have corrupted the covenant with Levi (2:8). Instead of turning many from sin, they had caused many to violate the law; instead of preserving knowledge, they had corrupted it; the messengers of the covenant had become the chief breakers of it. And here is where Malachi’s whole book begins to lean forward, toward the One who was coming. If the human messengers of the covenant had failed, if every priest in the line of Levi had, in the end, corrupted the trust, then the people of God were left longing for a true Messenger of the covenant: a Priest who would teach what is true without flaw, on whose lips no sinful word would ever be found, who would walk with God in perfect peace and integrity, and who would turn many, indeed a multitude that no one could count, away from sin. That true Messenger of the covenant the next session will name; for Malachi, having shown us the ruin of the old priesthood, is about to promise that the LORD would send His own messenger, and that the Lord would come Himself to His temple. The failure of Levi is the dark frame around the promise of the Branch who is Priest and King at once.

For there was coming a Priest who would keep the covenant with Levi as no son of Levi ever had; indeed, a Priest not of Levi’s line at all, but in the order of Melchizedek, as we heard in Zechariah and as the letter to the Hebrews unfolds. On His lips would be the truth without flaw; the apostle says of Him that He committed no sin, nor was deceit found in his mouth (1 Peter 2:22). He would walk with God in perfect peace and integrity, and turn not merely many but a multitude that no one could count away from sin. Every line of Malachi’s portrait of the ideal priest, which the sons of Levi had blotted and betrayed, would be drawn again, flawless, in the Lord Jesus: the faithful Priest, the true messenger of the covenant, the Branch we saw crowned in Zechariah, who is Priest and King at once. The failure of the old priesthood is not the last word; it is the dark frame that makes the true Priest shine the brighter when at last He comes to His temple.

The Wife of Your Youth

From the broken covenant of the priesthood the LORD turns to another covenant His people were breaking: the covenant of marriage. Do we not all have one father? Did not one God create us? Why do we betray one another, in this way making light of the covenant of our ancestors? (2:10). The men of Judah had been putting away the wives of their youth, often to marry foreign women who served other gods; and the LORD names the treachery for what it is. The LORD is testifying against you on behalf of the wife you married when you were young, to whom you have become unfaithful even though she is your companion and wife by law (2:14). Where the NET says wife by law, the Hebrew says the wife of your covenant. Marriage, Malachi teaches, is a covenant, and the LORD Himself is its witness; to break faith with the wife of one’s youth is to break a covenant made in God’s sight. And the LORD speaks of it with rare heat: “I hate divorce,” says the LORD God of Israel (2:16). He hates the treachery of divorce, the casting-off of the companion to whom one has pledged faith.

Notice the dignity Malachi gives to marriage, and how high a thing he makes it. It is a covenant, he says, and the LORD Himself is its witness: not a private arrangement to be dissolved at convenience, but a bond sworn in the sight of God, who stands as witness to every vow. And the wife is called a man’s companion, a word of partnership and shared life, not a possession to be discarded. The seriousness of the marriage covenant in Malachi flows from the same source as everything else in the Scriptures: marriage is a living picture of a greater covenant. The apostle would later unfold it fully: the union of husband and wife images the union of Christ and His Church, the Bridegroom and His bride. To break faith in marriage, then, is not merely a private failure; it defaces a picture God painted to show the world His own faithful love. And it is against the backdrop of human covenant-breaking that the steadfast covenant-keeping of God shines all the brighter.

We must handle this word with the same care the gospel always shows to the wounded. Malachi is not heaping shame on those who have suffered the breaking of a marriage, nor laying a fresh burden on consciences already grieved; the LORD’s anger is against the treachery of the faithless, not against the betrayed. The Lord Jesus would later take His stand on the same ground, calling His hearers back to the beginning: Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate (Matthew 19:6). But there is a deeper thing underneath the whole rebuke. The covenant of marriage, throughout the Scriptures, is the chosen picture of the covenant between God and His people; we saw it in Hosea, the faithful husband and the faithless bride. When Judah dealt treacherously with the wives of their youth, they were acting out in their homes the very unfaithfulness they had shown their God. And the gospel that stands over it all is this: the LORD is the husband who does not deal treacherously, who keeps the covenant His people break, who will not put away the bride He has betrothed to Himself forever. Our covenant-breaking is met by His covenant-keeping; and that faithfulness has a face, in the Bridegroom who loved the Church and gave Himself for her.

Where Is the God of Justice?

The second chapter ends with the cynicism reaching its lowest point, in words that, the prophet says, have wearied the LORD Himself. You have wearied the LORD with your words. But you say, “How have we wearied him?” Because you say, “Everyone who does evil is good in the LORD’s opinion, and he delights in them,” or “Where is the God of justice?” (2:17). Here the jaded heart speaks its final blasphemy. Looking at a world in which the wicked seem to prosper and the faithful to gain nothing, the people conclude that God either does not care about the difference between good and evil, or is not there to judge it at all: where is the God of justice? (The Hebrew word, mishpat, means both justice and judgment: they are asking where the Judge has gone.) It is the cynicism of every age that has watched evil flourish and grown tired of waiting for God to act, and has quietly decided that goodness is pointless and judgment a fiction.

This is perhaps the most modern-sounding complaint in the whole book, and it has not lost an ounce of its force. The faithful look out on a world where the ruthless prosper and the gentle are trampled, where wickedness seems to pay and goodness seems only to cost, and the old question rises in the heart: where is the God of justice? Does He see? Does He care? Is there any point in being good? It is the complaint of the psalms and of Job, and it is the complaint of every believer who has watched evil flourish and wondered why heaven is silent. The LORD does not treat the question as blasphemy to be crushed, though He says plainly that such words weary Him; rather, He answers it, and His answer is the heart of the gospel. The God of justice is not absent and not indifferent; He is coming. The delay that looks like absence is the patience of a God who sends a messenger before His judgment, and comes Himself first in mercy before He comes in wrath. The silence is not emptiness; it is the held breath before the dawn.

And it is exactly this weary, mocking question that the LORD will answer in the chapters to come, and He will answer it not with an argument but with a coming. Where is the God of justice? they ask; and the next words of the book are, I am about to send my messenger, who will clear the way before me. Indeed, the Lord you are seeking will suddenly come to his temple, and the messenger of the covenant, whom you long for, is certainly coming (3:1). You ask where the God of justice is? He is coming, nearer than you think, and not at all in the way you expect. The cynical question is the doorway to the gospel promise; the people who shrugged, where is the God of justice?, were about to be told that the God of justice was on His way, and that before Him would come a messenger to clear His path. The weariness of Malachi 2 is the dark just before the dawn of Malachi 3.

Gathering the Threads

Malachi is the last voice of the Old Testament, and he speaks into a spiritual condition we know all too well: not open rebellion, but weariness, cynicism, and contempt dressed up as routine religion. The people keep the forms and despise the substance; they meet the LORD’s every word with a shrug and a how? And the LORD answers them, patiently and searchingly. To their doubt of His love He answers with the free, distinguishing grace that chose Jacob over Esau for no merit at all: I have shown love to you, and the proof is that the love was never earned. To their contemptible worship, the blind and lame animals palmed off on His altar, He answers that He would rather the doors were shut than be honored with leftovers, and that His name will yet be great among the nations, a pure offering rising from every place. To the corruption of the priesthood that should have carried His covenant, He holds up the ideal of the faithful messenger they had betrayed.

And under it all, the book leans forward to the One who was coming. The blemished offerings cry out for the one unblemished Lamb; the failed messengers of the covenant cry out for the true Messenger of the covenant; the broken covenant of marriage is met by the covenant-keeping faithfulness of the divine Husband; and the weary question, where is the God of justice?, is about to be answered by His sudden coming to His temple. This is the things concerning Himself, sounding even in the cynicism and the weariness of the last age of the Old Testament: that the God who opened His final book with I have shown love to you would prove that love, at the last, by sending His messenger and coming Himself: the Lord Jesus, the spotless Lamb, the faithful Priest, the covenant-keeping Husband, the God of justice who would arrive not first in wrath but in mercy. The shrug of a jaded people could not exhaust the patience of God; behind the weariness of Malachi, the dawn was already breaking.

For Discussion

These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.

Malachi opens with I have shown love to you, and the people answer, How have you shown love to us? (1:2). How is this the cynicism of a comfortable, late-stage faith, too jaded to feel either God’s love or its own sin? Where do we meet God’s word with the same shrug?
The LORD proves His love by His free choice of Jacob over Esau, who had no more to commend him than his brother (1:2–3; Romans 9:13). Why is it actually a comfort that God’s love rests on nothing in us? How does he loved you because he loved you answer the question How have you shown love to us?
The priests offered God the blind, lame, and sick animals no one else would want (1:8), and the LORD said He wished someone would close the temple doors (1:10). Where are we tempted to give God our leftovers (the tired ends of our time, strength, and love) and call it worship?
Every offering Israel brought was blemished, and so are ours; only the Lamb without defect or blemish offered a pure offering (1:11; 1 Peter 1:19). How does this guard us from despair (our gifts are never good enough) and from pride (as if we could bring God anything pure on our own)?
The priest was meant to be the messenger of the LORD who rules over all (2:7) and instead corrupted the covenant (2:8). How does the failure of the human messengers make us long for the true Messenger of the covenant? Who is the Priest who taught what was true without flaw, in whose mouth no deceit was ever found?
Where is the God of justice? (2:17) is answered not by an argument but by a coming (3:1). What does it mean that the cynical question becomes the doorway to the gospel promise, that the God of justice came first in mercy, sending His messenger before Him?

Looking Ahead

We come now to the last session in the body of this volume: the final chapters of Malachi, and the very last words of the Old Testament, after which there falls a silence of four hundred years. To the weary question, where is the God of justice?, the LORD answers with a promise that opens straight onto the Gospels: I am about to send my messenger, who will clear the way before me. Indeed, the Lord you are seeking will suddenly come to his temple, and the messenger of the covenant, whom you long for, is certainly coming (3:1). He promises a refiner’s fire to purify the Levites, a reckoning for those who had wearied Him, and then, over those who fear His name, the rising of a healing Sun: But for you who respect my name, the sun of vindication will rise with healing wings (4:2). And the Old Testament closes by pointing forward to a coming Elijah, who would bring fathers and their children back to the LORD before the great Day. In the next session we will hear the last word of the Old Testament, and stand at the seam where it hands the reader over to the New: to the voice crying in the wilderness, and the dawn that breaks upon us from on high.

Before the next session, read Malachi 3–4: the promise of the messenger who clears the way and the Lord who suddenly comes to His temple, with the messenger of the covenant (3:1); the refiner’s fire and the launderer’s soap (3:2–3); the charge of robbing God in tithes and the opened windows of heaven (3:8–10); the day burning like a furnace, and the rising of the sun of vindication with healing wings (4:1–2); and the promise of Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of the LORD (4:5–6). Then read Matthew 11:7–15 and 17:10–13, where the Lord Jesus identifies John the Baptist as the promised Elijah, and Luke 1:76–79, the song of the dawn from on high. Ask what it means that the Old Testament ends pointing forward, and who the sun of vindication (the Hebrew is the sun of righteousness) turned out to be.

Closing Prayer

O Lord our God, who opens Your last book to a weary people with the words I have shown love to you, forgive us the cynicism that meets Your love with a shrug and Your worship with our leftovers. We confess that we have brought You the blind and the lame, the tired ends of our days, the scraps of our hearts, and called it devotion; and that we, like the priests of old, have too often despised the very name we were called to honor. Break the shrug in us; give us eyes to see the love that surrounds us, and hearts to give You our best and not our worst.

We bless You that Your love rests on nothing in us, but only on Your free and faithful mercy: that You loved us because You loved us, as You loved Jacob who deserved it no more than his brother. We thank You that when every human messenger of Your covenant had failed, You sent the true Messenger of the covenant, our Lord Jesus, the Lamb without blemish whose pure offering makes our blemished worship acceptable, the faithful Priest in whose mouth no deceit was found, the covenant-keeping Husband who will never put away His bride. Make our worship a pure offering in Him; keep us faithful where we have pledged faith; and answer the cynicism of our age, as You answered theirs, by the coming of Your Son; through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.